The University of Texas at El Paso requests support for institutional development activities in order to remove impediments to mental-health related research and for 4 research projects involving faculty in the Department of psychology. A major institutional objective is to foster the advancement of a newly-established Ph.D. program in Psychology, which is designed to train bilingual and bicultural psychologists to work in applied settings. With the support of the Minority Institution Research Development Program (MIRDP), this can be accomplished by developing competitive research and establishing a strong record of involving minority students in applied mental health research. The research projects will investigate a broad range of mental-health issues, most directly related to the bilingual and bicultural environment of the u.S.-Mexico border region. These include; (1) assessment of treatment strategies for chronically mentally ill Hispanics; (2) development of an animal model of visual processing that may be used to study the neural structures in generating event-related potentials; (3) assessment of the measurement equivalence of tests administered to Hispanics in their preferred language; and (4) event-related potentials as a technique to a assess bilingualism and differences between monolinguals and bilinguals.